Amateur dramatics

NEVER ACTED in a play or put a show together? A group of students from the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd) will be doing just that - in English - when they stage Harold Pinter's play A Night Out.

The cast consists mainly of Bachelor of Education (Language), or BEd, students. With a promising script by Pinter, an English poet and playwright, the show holds quite a few surprises.

Mark Almond, a visiting lecturer from the United Kingdom who teaches drama to Chinese students in immersion programmes, will direct the play. He was invited to Hong Kong to run different drama modules, and one of the projects resulted in the production of this play.

Mr Almond chose A Night Out because it is a play he knows well, and finds interesting. 'The BEd students are studying multicultural literature, and it is also a play they have studied, so they know the script well, and also the background of the play,' he says. 'From a language point of view, the script is not too complex. It is useful for learning English, as it has both monologues and short sentences. The students can experiment with different ways of saying short utterances, and it contains interesting idiomatic language.'

The production includes 15 actors, and five students in charge of things backstage, who will be building the set and all the props from scratch.

The two main characters in A Night Out are Albert and his mother, Mrs Stokes. Mrs Stokes will be played by Rainbow Zhang Lai-Hong, while Derek Lau Tak-Wing will be Albert.

The play is a whole new challenge for Lau, who says the director is very demanding, pushing the actors to learn all their lines and cues. 'It's an exciting experience to use my second language to perform, and there are lots of new things to learn. The script takes us into a whole new culture of England in the 50s and 60s.'